On the 25th anniversary of 9/11 it seems incumbent on essayists, of which I consider myself one, to reflect back on that event. There aren’t so terribly many of such events to commemorate.
On that Tuesday morning - September 11, 2001 - we were here in the home we’d built the previous summer, our second in Wyoming. We had returned the previous day from an RV trip to Banff, Jasper, and Lake Louise. That particular trip to the beautiful Canadian Rockies was neither our first nor, as it turned out, our last.
Somehow we were apprised of the first plane crash and turned on our TV. Then like most of America we spent the next couple of days watching TV, trying to understand what had happened, who was responsible directly and indirectly. The last time I remembered a timeout like that was when JFK was shot.
We’d considered spending a couple of more days in Canada before coming home, and chose not to. The US closed the border for several days after the attacks happened and we’d have been trapped in Canada. Peculiar what you remember about a major event.
Our national ability to forget has been discouraging. Somehow today NYC has a mayor who, I am certain, has celebrated the 9/11 attacks. Literally no one would have believed that 25 years ago, anyone claiming it would have been deemed certifiably insane.
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Meanwhile the Long War - of which 9/11 was but one unfortunate battle - continues as I write with a naval and economic blockade of Iran, punctuated by occasional tit-for-tat kinetic flare-ups. You’ll get arguments about when it began.
Some claim Long War began with the crusades to reclaim the holy land in 1100-1300, others might date it to the Ottoman defeat at Vienna by the Habsburgs in the late 1600s or the attacks on the Barbary pirates and the Greek independence, both in the early 1800s.
Ahistorical folk might date it to the overthrow of the Shah and capture of our embassy in Tehran in 1979. Let’s don’t forget the Marine barracks in Beirut or the Kobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. This is no new conflict and it’s not going away.
Of all the sad, silly, stupid things relevant to this commemoration is the recent description of Islam as a “religion of peace” by former President George W. Bush. He really wasn’t presidential material, was he?
